Tales from the top don't inspire company hires, but stories about the rank and file do, study finds

They are
prominent parts of the orientation new hires receive in many companies –
stories about the high deeds and standards of the firms' founders or top
executives. At McKinsey & Co. they may be stories about the impeccable
integrity and professionalism of long-time managing director Marvin Bowers. At
Starbucks they may be about CEO Howard Schultz's commitment to corporate social
responsibility and employee welfare.

What
impact do such narratives have on the corporate citizenship of newcomers to a
firm's rank and file, asks a paper in the current issue of the Academyof Management Journal. Little or none, the research concludes,
although the stories may lead employees to judge their co-workers more strictly
than they would otherwise do.

The
study, by Sean R. Martin of Boston College's Carroll School of Management,
finds that newcomers exposed to stories of sterling deeds of company leaders
are no more committed to the organization’s values and no more helpful to
co-workers than those not exposed.

What does
have a positive impact, Prof. Martin finds, are stories about the rank and file
– about employees, in other words, with whom the newcomers can identify. In the
words of the study, "Stories about high-level organizational members who
might be seen as organizational representatives are perhaps not as effective at
influencing some important and desired newcomer behaviors as was once
supposed." In contrast, "stories that one hears about peers,
coworkers, or others at one's own organizational level [prove] to be
influential means through which organizational values are embedded in
newcomers' behaviors."

He adds:
"Positive stories about high-level members may be useful for making the
[company's] values and injunctive norms salient. But to illustrate the ways
that values should guide behavior and encourage others to act in values-driven
ways, stories about characters at closer social distance may be more effective.
Combining both in newcomer socialization may help to both make the values
salient and encourage consonant action."

The study
analyzes the relationship between four different types of stories to which
newcomers at a large company were exposed and their subsequent behavior at
work. The newcomers were trainees of a large technology firm with a reputation,
Prof. Martin writes, "as a values-driven company where employees work hard
and go above and beyond to help clients and each other." The study's
sample consisted of 290 recent university graduates, about equally divided
between men and women, who were 10 weeks into a five-and-a-half-month training
period for entry-level programmers that was to culminate in eight-person
projects. The participants were divided into four groups, ranging from 59 to 81
members, with each of the four instructed to share with group members stories
from their 10 weeks with the company. Specifically, each of the groups was
instructed to share narratives with one of the four following themes, which
evoked stories as follows:

■High-ranking executives who
upheld company values. The group’s
response included stories about company officers resisting temptations to cut
corners or take bribes or acting to benefit clients or employees;

■High-ranking officers who
transgressed company values. Response elicited by this theme included stories
of execs treating people unfairly or lacking integrity;

■Lower-ranking
employees who upheld company values. Mostly
evoked stories of individuals going above and beyond the norm to help others;

■Lower-ranking
employees who violated values. Group’s response included stories of individuals cheating
on tests or acting rudely or demeaning others.

During
the following two months, to refresh participants' recollections, they were periodically
e-mailed stories shared in their particular group. In conclusion, all were
asked to respond to statements about members of their eight-person project
teams in order to yield two measures – 1) each person’s workplace helpfulness
(for example, "volunteered for things that are not required" and
"helped others who have heavy workloads"), and 2) workplace deviance
(for example, "took property from work without permission" or
"neglected to follow instructions" or "intentionally worked more
slowly than he or she could have worked)." Participants responded to
statements about helpfulness on a scale of 1/Strongly Disagree to 5/Strongly
Agree and to those regarding deviance on a scale of 1/Never to 7/Daily.

Members
of the group that shared stories about high-ranking officers with high
values had an average helpfulness score of 3.50, just about the same
as the 3.54 mean rating of more than 300 trainees who were not part of any
story-sharing group and who therefore served as controls. But the helpfulness
of both groups was rated significantly lower than the mean of 3.85 achieved by
members that shared stories about lower-ranking employees with high
values. Prof. Martin writes that “stories about high-level members were
more likely to convey the [firm’s] formally espoused values, but the
values-supporting and values-opposed stories about lower-level members appear
to be more impactful on behaviors.”

In
measures of deviance, a considerable surprise was that the group that turned
out to be most deviant, with a mean rating of 2.66, consisted of participants
who shared stories about high-ranking executives with high values. Controls
averaged a significantly lower deviance score of 2.19, as did the group that
shared values-upholding narratives involving lower-ranking workers, whose
mean was only 1.73.

Does this
negative response to stories about do-gooder leaders represent some kind of
perverse effect? Prof. Martin thinks it more likely that it reflects a
stiffening of standards. In the words of the study, “When newcomers hear
stories about high-level characters acting in values-upholding ways, it may
lead them to compare their peers to a very high behavioral standard that is
difficult to achieve and lead them to evaluate peers’ behavior stringently.”

In short,
stories about high deeds by company leaders don’t inspire rank-and-file workers
to be better corporate citizens themselves but may very well lead them to be
sterner in judging their peers.

Less
surprising is the study’s finding that stories about values violations by the
rank and file were associated with a deviance mean of 2.55, significantly more
than the mean rating of 2.19 for the control group. Prof. Martin sees this as
reflecting the special relevance employees assign to peer behavior in
determining their own.

In view
of this, Prof. Martin says, companies do well to assign high priority to
gathering employee stories. “Organizations invest significant resources to
socialize newcomers and embed in them the desired aspects of the culture,” he
writes in conclusion. “Cultural elements such as narratives might be used more
strategically to increase the likelihood that organizational values are
embedded in newcomers at the behavioral level.”

The paper, “Stories about Value and Valuable Stories: A Field
Experiment of the Power of Narratives to Shape Newcomers' Actions," is in
the October/November issue of the Academy of Management Journal. This
peer-reviewed publication is published every other month by the Academy, which,
with almost 19,000 members in 126 countries, is the largest organization in the
world devoted to management research and teaching. Its other publications
are Academy
of Management Review, Academy of Management Perspectives, Academy of Management
Learning and Education, Academy of Management Annals, and Academy of Management
Discoveries.